HP Laptop woes

mightynimrod · 20 Oct 2007 at 13:30

Hi ya fellas,

The missus has an HP Pavilion Notebook ZT1201S

I think she managed to get a virus on it as the svchost.exe was using 95% cpu so she took it to a friend who said he would re-install windows on it for her.

Now i'm sure we had a restore disc when i bought it (off the MM) but as we're packed up ready to move house it would mean rooting through a load of boxes.

Anyway, her friend from work used his version of XP home and it turns out that it wont install (this is after he's wiped the hdd)

I've tried it with mine to re-install XP but again it wont touch it.....do HP laptops have something in the bios that prevents a clean XP install or could it be something to do with the virus she had?

If anyone has a restore disc i could borrow i would be extremely greatful.

I've tried HP support but they don't want to know as it's a few years old.

Mattitude · 20 Oct 2007 at 15:30

I have a HP laptop and yes you should be able to install a fresh version.

The fact you cant seem to install this operating is strange and i have had the same problem but on a custom built computer before *windows 2008* now what i did is install windows 2003 and went through the update.

Im not sure what your case is as mine loaded the disc but froze during the first stage.

So if anything just keep trying other discs if you can, otherwise why cant hp just supply you with a replacement disc? i would try again.

mightynimrod · 20 Oct 2007 at 15:34

Because they say it's dicontinued, i've even tried another hard drive

Can anyone help?

shine · 20 Oct 2007 at 16:31

What error are you getting?

mightynimrod · 20 Oct 2007 at 22:28

shine said:
What error are you getting?

I'll have to give it another go as i can't remember now, it was over a week ago and ive been waiting for HP's response to my request for a recovery disc.

I'll try it again tomorrow and post it up

Kobrakai · 20 Oct 2007 at 22:33

I had an HP laptop a few months ago and found myself in a similar situation to you. It wouldn’t detect the hard drive when I went to install XP because it was SATA. I couldn’t press F6 to install the SATA drivers because that only works with a floppy disk and the laptop didn’t come with a floppy drive. In the end I had to put Vista on it, which already had my SATA drivers. I could have brought a USB floppy drive though.

mightynimrod · 20 Oct 2007 at 22:35

Kobrakai said:
I had an HP laptop a few months ago and found myself in a similar situation to you. It wouldn’t detect the hard drive when I went to install XP because it was SATA. I couldn’t press F6 to install the SATA drivers because that only works with a floppy disk and the laptop didn’t come with a floppy drive. In the end I had to put Vista on it, which already had my SATA drivers. I could have brought a USB floppy drive though.

The hdd is ide, im sure of it.

Rich43 · 24 Oct 2007 at 01:15

Try a Ubuntu CD

HTMLHugo · 26 Oct 2007 at 13:48

If you are desperate i can send you a copy of my hp recoevery dvds

however im not sure if they are machine specific in some way ?

Senture · 29 Oct 2007 at 13:57

Not sure weather you're stuck on this problem still or not, but make sure the XP disk is OEM not retail. The XP Pro key on the underside of my old NC8000 worked fine with the OEM copy but not retail.